There is no doubt about the buzz surrounding electric cars this year.
Major carmakers are betting big on the technology, but will it pay off?
One filmmaker thinks so, and his new film looks at the role the electric car will play in the future of the automotive industry.
Plugging in instead of filling up, this year many consumers will get their first chance to buy an electric car.
Electric models from Nissan and GM are now sold in the U.S. and Europe.
But this isn't the first time a major car maker has gone electric.
Rewind to 1997, GM released the EV1.
The electric car is here.
Not quite, it turns out.
Only 1,000 EV1s were produced, available only for lease in California and Arizona.
A few years later, GM decided to pull the plug, repossessing the cars and destroying them.
The Detroit giant said that the technology simply wasn't ready.
Many of the early converts were disappointed, including Chris Paine.
We had an amazing experience with this car, and one day they said, we're taking the cars back.
And it wasn't just my car, it was all these cars.
So we started digging down to see what had happened,
and it turned out that a variety of forces had kind of come together to kill this generation of cars.
So that's why we made the film, to kind of make a murder mystery out of this whole story.
His 2006 film, Who Killed the Electric Car? became a cult hit.
It chronicled the short life of electric cars in the late '90s
which arrived as a result of tighter restrictions on air pollution in California.
The film didn't shy away from laying blame.
The culprits in the film ranged from the oil companies to the carmakers themselves.
In 2011, it is a radically different climate.
Enter Paine's new documentary, The Revenge of the Electric Car. This time, electric cars are going mass market.
There's a degree of excitement around electric vehicles we hadn't seen before.
The film follows four leaders in the field:
former GM vice chairman Bob Lutz, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn...
We need to predict the future, prepare for it. If it happens, we'll be ready.
Electric car enthusiasts Greg Abbott and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Until we see every car on the road being electric, we will not stop.
This big surprise is that electric cars are coming back as fast as they are.
Some people are, you know, wondering whether our film is trying to be too corporate friendly in a sense,
but my intention is electric cars need to be in the marketplace.
We haven't been able to buy them.
If the corporations are going to help us buy them, then we're gonna tell that story.
The electric cars featured in the film are currently available only in select markets.
So for many around the world,
we'll have to wait until spring for the film and even later for the cars.